Legal Ontologies Foundry

The Legal Ontologies Foundry (LOF) is a collaborative initiative to develop interoperable, logically well-formed ontologies for the legal domain. Following the model of the OBO Foundry, member ontologies share a common upper ontology (Basic Formal Ontology, ISO/IEC 21838-2), a common format (OWL 2), persistent identifiers, and a common set of principles. As a result, models of obligations, rights, roles, institutions, legal acts, and evidence built by different groups can be combined without translation loss.

Founding draft

This site is in its founding phase. The principles, policies, and governance pages are drafts for ratification by the founding coordinators. Proposed changes are welcome as pull requests or in Discussions.

Why a foundry

Legal information systems, from court records and statutory databases to compliance tools and AI systems that reason about law, increasingly depend on machine-readable representations of legal entities. Existing legal vocabularies were developed largely in isolation, with incompatible upper-level commitments, which makes them difficult to integrate or audit. The Foundry applies the methods that have succeeded in the biomedical sciences: shared principles, coordinated development, public review, and orthogonal ontologies that each cover a well-delimited domain.

Start here

If you want to...	Go to
Understand what member ontologies commit to	Principles
Find an ontology or pattern	Registry
Reuse a modeling solution	Design patterns
Propose a new ontology	New ontology request
Request a term	Term requests
Use LOF identifiers	Identifier policy
Learn how the Foundry is run	Governance

Founding coordinators

David R. Koepsell, William Mandrick, and Barry Smith.

License

Unless otherwise noted, content on this site and all Foundry ontologies are released under CC BY 4.0.